She ran down the steps and scrambled into the car, and the Providence which cares for the improvident carried her to the station just in time for the arrival of the train from New York.
A perspiring throng was pouring out of the station, but she had to wait for some time before she was joined by a fair-haired young man in a light gray suit, whose movements had the deliberation of a nervous traveller determined to keep cool.
The two greeted each other with friendly familiarity. “I was afraid you’d get tired of waiting, and run away before I turned up,” the young man said, as he put himself and his suitcase into the motor, “but I didn’t want to get mixed up with that dripping crowd.”
She replied with a laugh that running away was the last thing the motor was thinking of, and that it was doubtful if they wouldn’t have to push her up the hill or drop her at a garage for repairs. But this did not seem to dismay him.
“I suppose Lorry’s been out in her again,” he merely remarked; and Miss Spear rejoined that it was no use trying to hide the family secrets from him. He settled himself comfortably at her side, and she put her hand on the wheel. The car, after making a spasmodic dash, hovered a moment between arrest and movement, and then spurted up the mountain as if nothing in the world had been the matter with it. As they bumped up the road under the dark arch of overhanging trees Halo lapsed into silence, her attention seemingly absorbed in the delicate task of persuading the motor to forget its grievances till they were safely landed at Eaglewood. In reality her mind was still lingering over her talk with young Weston, and his curious way of leaping straight at the gist of things, as when, at the Willows, he had asked her as soon as she appeared in the doorway who had written “Kubla Khan,” and just now had seized upon her mention of a mountain pool, instantly crying: “Could I get to it?” That way of disposing of preliminaries, brushing them aside with an impatient shake, as he tossed the tumbled hair from his forehead—what a sense it gave of a latent power under his unformed boyish manner. And what a wonderful thing life would be without idle preliminaries—as clear of smoke and rubbish as the crystal world of sunrise she was going to show him from the mountain! Getting at once to the heart of things: that was the secret. But how many people know it, or had any idea where the heart of things really was? …
She felt a touch on her arm. “Penny, Halo.”
“My thoughts? I don’t know. … Well, yes.” She gave a little laugh. “I was thinking I’d spent thirty dollars this afternoon, and what I’d bought with it.”
“New hat?”
She laughed. “Exactly. A new hat—a wishing-cap!”
He laughed too, with an easy vague air of assent and approval. “Though why you women keep on buying new hats as you do, when you all of you go bareheaded—”
“Ah,” she murmured, “that’s what makes it such fun. Art for art’s sake. Besides, as it happens, my new hat’s invisible, and I’ve got it on at this very minute. …”
“Well, if you have it’s awfully becoming,” he rejoined.
“How silly! When you know you can’t see it—”
“I don’t so much care about that, if I can see what’s going on underneath it.” She fell suddenly silent, and he added in the same quiet voice: “Halo, can I?”
“Just what is it you want to see?”
“Well—just if you think we’re engaged.”
She drew away slightly from his gesture. “When you think we are it always makes me think we’re not.”
“Oh well—I’ll try not to think about it at all then,” he rejoined good-humouredly.
To this at the moment she made no answer, and they drove on again in silence under the overhanging boughs; but as she turned the motor in at the gate she said, with another of her fugitive laughs and eyes bent on his: “You see, Lewis, I’m as like this old car as her twin sister. When she says she won’t she almost always does.”
IX
The summer darkness rustled with the approach of dawn. At the foot of the lane below the Tracys’ Vance Weston felt the stir as if it were one with the noise in his own temples: a web of sounds too tenuous to be defined or isolated, but something so different from the uniform silence which had enveloped the world an hour earlier
